Guatemala: The Ground Rules (3)

One of the key lessons I have learned over the years here in Central America is that a gradualist approach pays dividends. 

You can usually tell the new arrivals from the so-called developed world. They are the ones that emanate a kind of residual momentum about them; the ones who still feel that if you lack something, now is always the best time to fill that need. 

But understanding that the best option is not always concurrently available — alongside all those not so great or plain mediocre choices — can be an important life skill here. In Guatemala, good things do eventually come to those who wait. 

Notes from inside the donut (1)

The misanthropic frisson of centrist politics right now comes from being able to share the hate pretty evenly between Left and Right. i.e.

The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual — and his rights — as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.

L. Neil Smith in Cambodian Road Trip. 

El Engaño Populista (1)

@crazyglorita and @axelkaiser promoting their new polemic in LAG's Parque Central. (No point in me commenting further until I have read it!)

Here Gloria explains how the populist politician and his or her victims share the mentalities of both participants in an abusive relationship. 

Forces of Nature

So tonight V and I watched part three of Brian Cox and his Forces of Nature. 

These programmes have represented some of the most televisually and educationally stunning content I have ever come across, but not always in the most joined up of ways.

I've wondered whether the order was fixed when the scripts were submitted, because the first episode was the most coherent. If the series had kicked off with Monday's third installment, I think it might have struggled to pick up an audience.

In truth the second half was profound and quite gripping, but the earlier sections had been a bit nerdy and Cox's efforts to descibe complex chemistry always seems to involve him waving his arms around and contorting his fingers in apparent bloody-minded determination not to have to resort to anything so Open University as a diagram.

In the end the moth (and its accompanying flame) came good as the gelling agent or recurring motif, but not quite as successfully as the snowflake in episode one, and some of the beautiful National Geographic-style digressions seemed just that, slightly indulgent asides without the obvious payload of a serious point delivered unequivocally at the end of each sequence.

Smothering his habitual smirk, the Professor finished with the observation that our common ancestor, our maker even, is the planet itself. This powerful conclusion felt non-pithy and well earned, and was rather cheekily illustrated by a moth tiptoeing over what looks like a valuable early edition of Milton. 

In fact the one time in the series Cox has resorted to a sort of diagram it muddied one of the profounder points he's just made in episode two: that the apparent forward motion of the fourth dimension of spacetime may just be an artifact of subjective experience. Or as he put it, 'all in our heads'. The diagram however showed the sun and the planets objectively moving through four dimensions without any reference to an observer. 

Quack

If I were to critique / mock the Donald or the Boris in a manner which referenced their appearance, I doubt very much whether I'd face the same barrage of criticism should my chosen target instead have instead been Saint Jeremy. i.e. 'It doesn't matter that it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...we need to get beyond this...it's a sad reflection on modern politics' etc. etc. 

Well, believe it or not, the leader of Her Majesty's opposition has to be more than any old convenient host for a pay-load of policies.

The yanquis are coming...

When I was last in Havana back at the start of 2015 the prices of state-owned hotels already seemed to be rising in anticipation of the coming onslaught of greenback-waving rubberneckers. 

I ended up staying a couple of nights at a somewhat frayed little establishment in Vedado that caters for local and second tier international business guests. 

The other day I speculatively checked the place's website and discovered that one night will now set one back 250 euros, close to a 300% increase since February last year. 

Now this is pricey indeed for a hotel where running water appears to be something of a rarity. 

The price hike seems to be quite widespread. And it is a great shame, because the grand old hotels of Havana — the Inglaterra, the Nacional, the Raquel, the Florida et al. — have been quite an experience during their underclocked three star communist epilogue.  

A little pricey, but no so much to deter the ageing French socialistes and rugged Russian middle orders — and, in the snow-laden months, the Canucks — who contributed so much to the city's atmosphere since the wall came down and Cuba itself almost collapsed shortly afterwards. 

Out of sheer greed the regime is quite possibly going to deplete this tried and tested source of demand in favour of a newer, richer influx who, once the thrill of the gawp has gone, may not find the place quite to their exacting standards. And their very presence will have spoiled much of what made this crumbly old city so appealing. 

UPDATE: Soon, they'll be chanting 'y'all have a nice day now...'. Grim. 

Half Full / Half Empty

I suppose that on most days my outlook bears some resemblance to the existential status of one notoriously superpositional kitty.  

To wit, until someone opens my box, metaphorically speaking, I am never quite sure if my glass is half full or half empty.

It's as if I cannot decide which elcadejo I habitually inhabit: the nice one which follows people home to make sure they get back safely, or the sociopathic w%&?er. 

Anyway, I did one of these tests of FB today, presumably in my unboxed state, and have ended up feeling just a tad dull...

Tom Hiddleston

Practically the perfect choice to play your bog standard slippery outsider, yet also irreducibly posh.

Together these traits make him both so right and yet so wrong for two of his most notable recent roles: Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager and Dr Laing in High Rise.

American casting directors might be forgiven for an imperfect grasp of our class system, but these two productions were properly British, so the selection of leading man had to have been made on the grounds that his dazzling interloper charm outweighed his less appropriate aura of upper-crustiness...

In the wake of modernity...

The War on Terror has never more clearly been a war on the mentalities that modernity wishes to leave behind. 

The trouble is that modernity, in the form of globalisation, is spawning ever more of these mentalities behind it - often in a particularly malignant hybrid form - even as it surges on. 

Anyone who thinks that modernity with smoother edges will somehow solve this problem is clearly delusional.

Location, location...

Been racking my brains all morning to come up with an equivalent combination of public space and public event in Europe which would have lent itself to this kind of atrocity....and I can't. The Americans are going completely hysterical, but how many of their major cities celebrate July 4 on a street like this? 

However primitive the methodology might appear, somebody picked this location and thought the desired carnage through very thoroughly. 

Importantly, it would have been fairly easy to prevent too. How did the lorry breach whatever barrier had been put up to divert vehicular traffic from the Promenade? 

Been there...

There is nothing wrong at all with focusing on an issue that matters to you.

Yet I am surely not alone in having noticed that many of the people that get the hump when some idiot screeches ¨all lives matter!¨ are the same ones who themselves express outrage when Facebook permits users to shade their profile picture with one particular flag and not the flag of say, every other country that recently experienced a terror attack.

I'm against this sort of ill-conceived relativism wherever it occurs, but having said that, I did notice that American politicians were not quite falling over themselves to declare a state of war after the recent attack in Baghdad. Maybe in that instance the belicose urge was offset by voices whispering ¨been there, done that¨. 

La Antigua's mendicants by - furry - proxy

I have a bookmarks folder on my Macbook entitled ANIMAL PARASITES. 

Within are the URLs of the - so far - 27 entities operating in and around LAG with a Facebook page promoting activities such as the rescue, adoption, curing, nourishing and neutering of animals, principally cats and dogs. 

27. I very much doubt there are a similar number of local projects with a more humanistic remit. I also doubt whether the majority are formally registered as charities or NGOs; but the urgent plea for donations is common to all. 

Residents of this city will be well aware of the deadbeats who dress up as bomberos (firemen-paramedics) and stand on street corners or even wander around the outer neighbourhoods with their collection boxes, but in some ways this burgeoning animal welfare scam is the bigger one. 

Now the parasites have acquired some barnacles of their own: scroungers that post pictures of supposedly needy creatures to the Facebook pages of the established organisations, usually accompanied by text written in ersatz uneducated Spanish (see example below). 

A little bit of legwork has revealed that many of these emanate from aliases belonging to a small group of individuals who,  in their non-pseudonym profiles, look anything but like the sort of person who would spell 'apoyo' as 'apollo' or 'concentrado' as 'consentrado'. etc. 

There are of course many street dogs and street cats in Guatemala that could benefit from a more conscientious culture. But 'charitable' activity on this scale and on this one issue is deeply suspicious. 

It used to be that the archetypal talentless foreigner washed up in LAG would open a bar or restaurant. Now bogus NGOs seem to be the preferred way of living off other people's generosity, with the animal welfare / social media combination in particular seen as the ideal way to manipulate an income here. 

In a number of cases they have co-opted an avaricious local vet into their scheme. Together they clean up with the medicines and minor operations involved in the adoption process in much the same way that restaurants do with their wine lists. 

One of the most visible of these organisations is run by a couple that had to flee the US and were then turfed out of Belize because its male component had been convicted for grooming a minor (exposed on US TV) and banned from using the Internet. 

As with many others, animals without apparent owners have become the substrate for a life in exile. 

Some of the second-tier mendicants by proxy appear to be keeping a substantial pack of malnourished animals in a state of utter squalor while they cynically appeal for outside assistance. In the UK these people would already have been investigated by the RSPCA. 

Yet consider this: 85% of the world's 1bn dogs are 'village dogs': canines that scavenge a life, often very successfully, from within human communities in the developing world. The notion that each and every one of these is in urgent need of adoption into a caring, affluent domestic environment is both spurious and vaguely hegemonic. 

Nemesis...

So, this is where we find ourselves...

Populism triumphs by telling barefaced lies to large sections of the population that have become vulnerable to such mendacity through bitter disenchantment with existing social and political power arrangements.

In the past couple of decades it has become the scourge of the developing world, particularly Latin America, where it undermines or infiltrates traditional two party arrangements based on class identity, borrowing from the rhetoric of both and adding its own nationalistic hyperbole that resonates within communities disconcerted by globalised neoliberalism. 

Now it has taken hold in the so-called rich world, thanks in no small part to the burgeoning wealth disparities within it worthy of the under-developed rich-poor world. 

The ideological extremists of the last century taught us that it was ultimately handier to tell big lies than little ones. Crucially however, they then acted as if they had come to believe many of their own audacious whoppers. 

Not so with the modern demagogic populists. Whether or not Trump's primary audience believes that there will soon be a big wall along the border paid for by Mexico, it is almost painfully obvious that HE does not believe it. Ditto Boris Johnson and the £350m that was going to be redirected to the NHS after Brexit. 

Populism has been most successful — and ultimately calamitous — in countries where the movement has been fronted by charismatic manipulators capable of transcending the political system which brought them to power. (Such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.) 

In Britain however, having engineered a political and constitutional crisis of historical magnitude, the populists have apparently lacked the courage of their lack of conviction; Boris in particular, looking, as one wit put it, like the dog that caught the car.

Meanwhile, the two main traditional parties have the appearance of rusty old hulks torpedoed beneath the water line. Both also seem far more concerned about patching themselves up than imaginatively engaging with the crisis unleashed by the cynical —  or some would say purist —  populist insurgents on their back-benches. 

It would appear that the current Conservative government will survive in some sort of reconfigured form, at least in the short term. Decisive leadership, of the sort the country now needs, is unlikely to result from this process. 

Indeed, murmering platitudes about 'the will of the people' it seems likely that our current political leadership-without-leaders will, out of a misplaced British sense of civic duty and a polite unwillingness to offend, proceed to consummate the catastrophe initiated by those irresponsible elements within who decided not to face up to the consequences of their words and actions.

It is highly likely that when we take into consideration both the younger demographic that didn't come out to vote in such large numbers and the growing number of people who are coming to realise just how badly they have been scammed (or at least abandonned by their scammers), 'the will of the people' is a dynamic phenomenon and there may well already be a small, underlying majority in favour of remaining in the EU, at least in terms of current opinion in a very fluid situation. 

Whatever happens now will set a dangerous precedent for our political system and leave roughly half the population with a sense of having been cheated by democracy. There is no hiding how damaging and dangerous this will be and how it will probably take at least a generation to fix, if at all. 

Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times this week that any failure to 'respect' the democratic will of the people, as expressed by the June 23rd plebiscite, would result in 'tanks on the streets'. Welcome to Venezuela.  

Those, like Lawson, with a long-term commitment to the abstract notion of Brexit before all the lies were deployed to bring it about, are showing signs of nervousness that only the irrevocable invocation of Article 50 will now dispel. 

They will have intuited that the ground is already shifting again, that the leaders of their movement are already dispersing, and that the bulk of Leave voters are just too old to come out and defy the (almost certainly metaphorical) tanks. 

If the Conservative government is likely to press on with the task of sailing into the storm out of fear of on-board mutiny should their new captain even suggest hauling the sails down, Parliament as a whole would probably favour turning around. 

Knowing that you will inevitably piss off half the country, it makes sense from a pragmatic perspective to elect piss off the half that is older, more used to being disappointed and losing momentum fast. 

Yet there's also a set of more high-minded arguments for disregarding the referendum result. Firstly, the moral one. Election fraud is usually taken to mean fiddly diddly at the polling station, but in this instance the chicanery and swindle took place at the level of the hustings and the basic propositions presented to the electorate. 

Secondly the constitutional and ideological objections. The referendum was called for highly expedient reasons which immediately posed an existential threat to the world's oldest parliamentary democracy. 

Some have tried to dress it up rather insincerely as a triumph of popular democracy, but these sort of consultations are actually a travesty of our age-old democratic process, as they expose us all to the dishonesty of demagogues. 

And, as I noted in a post earlier in the week, our parliamentary system has evolved to allow us to transcend our localised viewpoints —  to be more than the sum or our parts —  whereas these referenda pander to the sort of partial perspectives that the populists feed off. 

Anything other than prevarication is however unlikely in the short to medium term unless a return to normal service can be signalled via the calling of a general election.

In the meantime, Britain may itself become a mere sideshow in the hollowing out of western discourse: the emergence of the kind of 'donut politics' that results when the centre collapses as voters are drawn to the extremes. 

Across the pond Trump started with Mexicans, moved on to Muslims and now has Jews in his sights. The Brexit result suggests that nobody can afford to be complacent now about his chances of victory in November. (Anyone who wants to know what Trump really thinks about the uneducated proletariat should watch Anthony Baxter's 2011 documentary You've Been Trumped, which tracks the Donald's campaign to displace the 'horrible' plebs presenting a potential eye-sore around the fringes of his elite golf resort near Aberdeen.)

As well as giving a sense of renewed empowerment to our native xenophobes, the Brexit referendum result may further encourage insurgent politicians across the continent, which could mean that our own modest efforts to shore things up over the next couple of years are rendered irrelevant. 

The next big test would seem to be the French election in 2017. Spain's most recent stab at resolving its own political crisis —  a repeated general election which took place in the immediate aftermath of our referendum —  did seem to offer some cause for optimism as the populists failed to surge as expected. Perhaps the UK is already functioning, as Charlie Brooker puts it, as the world's leading cautionary tale. 

Nevertheless, populist engagement with ignorance and jingoism is a dynamic, catalytic process, creating ever greater shallowness and moronic disregard for facts wherever it operates. 

The more reticent, reasonable politicians of the centre have been written off as compromised and corrupt and the lessons of the last century —  the very rationale for open-minded, middle-of-the-road policies and complex, transnational institutions like the EU —  are rapidly being forgotten. 

That said, the hole in the middle of our donut may be as much opportunity as threat, and law-makers around the developed world urgently need to explore the potential for creating a new kind of knowledge-informed politics before things destabilise further.

Guatemala: The Ground Rules (2)

'Va a estar alegre'.

Run...

Guatemala: The Ground Rules (1)

Do something once and you will be expected to do it a second time.

Do it a second time and it will be a lifelong obligation. 

Flight to the far edges...

There is a flight from the centre towards the far left and the far right. 

Those involved in the flight to the left - Sanders and Corbyn supporters say - have to be aware that an equal and opposite movement to reactionary extremism is happening at the same time. 

And that the two phenomena may not be disconnected. History certainly seems to suggest otherwise. 

They can look back at the Spanish Civil War and think 'ooh I would have supported the Republic', but what they should be thinking is that the Spanish Civil War was something worth preventing at all costs. 

Another example of the wood and trees bias problem flagged up below. 

We need to temper our ideas and resulting actions with a sense of context. 

The most annoying of all cognitive biases...

In the course of the past week I may have referred to people who voted LEAVE on at least one occasion as ‘ignorant and stupid’. While some undoubtedly are, many surely are not.

The real problem is that many of them belong to the group of people who at almost every stage of my adult life - academic, professional and social - have made me want to shuffle off into a corner and spontaneously combust.

This is that group of people who are unable to see the wood from the trees. (Though sometimes its the trees from the wood!)

For many this does seem to result from some innate cognitive bias.

Some of these people will however be considered otherwise smart and cultured in many of the contexts in which they operate.

The majority within the group as a whole may suffer the condition only occasionally, and then as result of some sort of situational stimulus or distorted perspective.

And this is essentially the problem with trusting a referendum to resolve really vital issues like our membership of the EU. The very nature of the format is sure to produce a sort of compound of limited, localised perspectives, not entirely unlike that of the famous fable of the blind men and the elephant.

Parliamentary democracy is not there to act as some sort of sinister system of control, constantly thwarting our democratic urges, it is there to help our society transcend our individual limitations, to be something more than the sum of our parts.

Idioms

In abandoning his plan to restore surplus by 2020, the Chancellor George Osborne said today that...

'We will fix the roof when the sun is shining.'

How very un-Chapin of him. 

The equivalent saying here would be something along the lines of...

'We'll cross that bridge when there's a flash flood and maybe the bridge isn't even there any more.'

Conspiracies

There are two kinds of conspiracy. Firstly, those which are underpinned by an element of truth and secondly, those which can only either be spot on or spot off. 

So when Icke and his like say the EU is a faceless bureaucracy serving the interests of big business, they are tapping into the first kind. When they suggest that Hillary Clinton is a flesh-eating lizard in a rubber mask, or that Neocons brought down the twin towers, they are tapping into the second. 

Further examples of the first kind...

• The internet is a playground for pervs and paedophiles
• Islam is a dangerous religion
• White working class people are missing out on housing and other social services due to uncontrolled immigration
• Michael Gove is a flesh-eating lizard (Boom tish!)

The latter category of conspiracy is undoubtedly becoming more prevalent in contemporary discourse, perhaps because the purveyors of paranoia have seen how the impersonal forces of globalisation have left more and more people feeling disempowered, and thus susceptible. 

Even those who have specialised in Type II conspiracies - like David Icke - have widened their repertoire to include more of the Type I narratives. 

So, where does the whole 'Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable' conspiracy fit into this? First kind or second kind? 

Like chemtrails or 'the Mexicans are about to attack', it looks like a binary at first glance. However...